Facebook launches Bounty Program to reward people for report of data abuse by app developers

Facebook announced the launch of Data Abuse Bounty program yesterday. The program offers a monetary reward to the people who report any kind of data abuse by app developers. The amount of reward will vary based on the impact of each report.

This program will reward people with first-hand knowledge and proof of cases where a Facebook platform app collects and transfers people’s data to another party to be sold, stolen or used for scams or political influence. Just like the bug bounty program, we will reward based on the impact of each report. While there is no maximum, high impact bug reports have garnered as much as $40,000 for people who bring them to our attention.

In a blog post announcing the launch of this program, Facebook said they were committed to launching this program for the past a few weeks as a part of their efforts to uncover potential abuse of people’s information more quickly.

Let’s not forget that a program like this from Facebook is not new as they already have a bug bounty program which is aimed to uncover security issues. Now, a specific drive to ascertain data abuse, or at least to let people know they care for privacy, comes in the nick of time when the company is trying every bit to recover its adversely affected image by the recent Cambridge Analytics incident.

Here are some of the actions which Facebook has taken after the incident: